I've had a fairly hectic couple of weeks traveling around the globe; part pleasure, part business.

I arrived back on Wednesday last week from a family holiday to India having flown London-Delhi, Delhi-Calcutta, Calcutta-Bagdogra, Bagdogra-Delhi then Delhi-London. It was an amazing trip and if you've never been to India try to set aside a week or two in your poker schedules and give it a go, it's a real eye-opener.

Having got home I had to quickly get a Russian visa as I'd been invited by the Association for Protection of Rights and Interests of Poker Enthusiasts to attend a conference they were having in St Petersburg on Saturday and give a speech lending my support to their cause.

Some of you will be aware that in August this year we had to quickly relocate our EPT event in Moscow to Kyiv because poker was removed from the list of recognized sports in Russia. As the casinos had all been closed in July there was nowhere to hold the event. Currently Russian Poker players have nowhere to play poker on their home soil which is a sad state of affairs especially when you consider the number of excellent players that have been making such an impact on the International poker circuit over the last few years. They seem to have put together a very strong lobby and hopefully the authorities there will see sense and allow some dedicated poker clubs to re-open.

I arrived back on Monday and flew to Amsterdam on Tuesday morning to play in the main event of the Master Classics of Poker on Tuesday afternoon. This has been an annual sojourn for many British players as it is one of the best run events around and always has been. Myself, Barny and Ross Boatman and Vicky Coren were due to join the usual suspects like 'The Camel' (Keith Hawkins) , The Alterman Brothers, Surindar Sunar, Ben Roberts etc. Vicky backed out at the last minute, claiming she was too busy moving flats, but we all suspect it was her usual fear of flying, especially when she realized we were coming back on Friday 13th.

The field in Amsterdam is considerably stronger than it used to be five or six years ago and the target seems to be a lot smaller! I always have this inner sense of whether or not I'm going to do well in an event and to be honest I never really felt that bullish from the word go. I was pretty patient for about two and a half 90 min levels and then, as is my nature, decided to get busy and try to accumulate some chips. Accumulation turned to annihilation and I ended up sitting in a 10-20 PLO game shortly after the dinner break.

I managed to turn 2K into 10K and then quit for the night having won back my buy-in to the tournament and made a couple of grand extra. The line-up in the 5K PLO game the following day didn't look all that attractive, but I like a challenge so decided to risk the previous day's profit against the following: Theo Jorgensen, Mads Anderson, Thomas Pichon, John Kabbaj, Euan O'Dea, Martin Vallo, Jan Sorensen and a couple of others.

Now these guys are no slouches when it comes to PLO and I was going to have to be pretty careful disguising my hands and watching my positional play because they are all capable post-flop players and can sense weakness like no others. After about six hours I'd built my stack up to 30K and was considering calling it a day when I flopped top set of kings on a K-2-7 board with two clubs. I had no clubs in my hand. Now Jan Sorensen had raised pre-flop and when he called my check-raise on that board I figured he had A,A, x, x, min, with the nut flush draw or possibly even the case K to go with it. OK so now an off-suit A comes on the turn and this is a big scare card for me. I check and he bets about 5K into the 8K pot. Not being a good enough player to lay this down and wait for better situations, I call this bet. The ace pairs on the river and I have to fold to his 12K bet and then proceeded to steam off the rest of my stack in other appallingly played hands because I have this very bad habit of tilting when I lose a big pot.

Sometimes I wish I could learn to take a walk and regroup instead of throwing my toys (and money) out of the pram, but whilst I recognize that this is one of the biggest weaknesses in my game I just don't seem to be able to do anything about it. Maybe meditation would help I don't know.

I ended the trip to Amsterdam in a very friendly 5-5 NLH game and made about a 1.5K profit, which put me at 500 Euro down from the previous day. Not a complete disaster, but having been 28k up at one point, not the result I was hoping for.

Now I've arrived home and am looking forward to the Sunday Million on PokerStars this weekend. Maybe one day I'll find that 'Pause' button.

The HU field looked pretty grim being full of some of the best HU players in the world, but I knew that given the right opportunities and a bit of luck, I had as good a chance as any of the competition.

The first three matches went pretty easily and in match three I won a significant coin-flip with A-K against Q-Q which got me through effectively to the money. Then came a match against someone I hadn't played before or indeed ever heard of, but it was soon very clear to me that 'Dokosovo' was not going to be a pushover; in fact the very opposite.

The semi-final itself took over 260 hands where the lead kept switching between the two of us and Dokosovo's command of HU was self-evident. It soon became apparent to me that this was a player capable of laying down some good hands if I played it right. Furthermore, he was a player whose aggression could be used against him if the circumstances dictated. This happened on the last hands at blinds of 100-200 when I was dealt pocket queens and limped on the button hoping that Dokosoko may push with any weak ace or small/medium pair.
I had 6,000 to his 4,000 chips and indeed he did shove which gifted me the final table and a guaranteed $200,000.

Having agreed with towliestar to play for 60K and chop the rest, we set to it and to be honest he didn't appear to be in the same league as Dokosoko and I felt quite confident that I could finish this fairly quickly.

Unfortunately luck just wasn't on my side and I also made one bad laydown early on with this hand. I raised with 5-6 suited on the button and was called. Flop came 5-5-K and I bet and was called by towliestar. The king paired on the turn, so I checked, figuring there was a small possibility that he had a weak king on the flop. A 7 on the river didn't seem to change too much and when he checked I figured my house was good and value bet 300. When he raised me up to 925 I mistook this for strength and folded. Had I called this bet I would have been 7-3 in chips and in a commanding position. It turned out he had pocket 2's so this was a great check bluff on the river.

I then lost a hand where I raised with A-Q to be called by his 6-6 and the flop came K-Q-Q. He checked and I bet 2/3 of the pot which he called. Now I was trying to figure out what he could have been calling with. There were 2 clubs on board and the obvious straight draw, so he must have something like this, or have me crushed with K-Q (unlikely). A small pair was also a possibility, but seemed unlikely. The 6 on the turn was also a club, so when he checked I decided to check behind him hoping to improve my hand. An offsuit 9 on the river also was a scare card for me as it filled the possible straight. When he checked again it just seemed suspicious as indeed it was. I check too and he took the pot down with 6's full.

After these two hands I never really regained my composure and let towliestar win this match, which to be honest I should have taken down with ease. C'est La Vie!

There are many significant steps on poker’s modern evolutionary road. The obvious one to most people is Chris Moneymaker’s rise from Tennessee accountant to poker World Champion thanks to a $39 online satellite. Further back still there was Team PokerStars Pro Tom McEvoy’s main event win 25 years ago, when he became the first Champion to have won his entry in a live satellite.

But in between those are two landmarks involving the same person.

The first came in 2000 when the Poker Million, the first event to award £1million to the winner (that was $1.4 million at the time), was staged on the Isle of Man.

The second occurred in a bath tub a few years later, coming to the same guy as he wallowed away in the tub, the idea striking him for a series of poker events to be staged across Europe, culminating in a glamorous grand final.

Of course that man was Team PokerStars Pro John Duthie.

"It's hard to believe," said John back in season one of the EPT. "It was just a year and a month and ago I sat in the bath and thought, 'that would be a good idea.'"

In fact it was a great idea. John had successfully combined his talents for directing drama on TV to doing the same for poker. After countless meetings, negotiations and the backing of PokerStars, the European Poker Tour was born – perhaps the most popular series of events outside the World Series – including the prestigious EPT Grand Final held with the beautiful backdrop of Monte Carlo.

These moments though could easily have gone the other way. Duthie’s aggressive raises against the likes of Teddy Tuil and Ian Dobson back in 2000 could have been cut down had fate dealt them a different hand. For the sake of a bad river card European Poker could have taken an altogether different path.

The same hypothetical asked of Chris Moneymaker’s adventure five years ago - Sam Farha calling Chris‘s bluff - would pose the question of what would the World Series look like today had Chris not captured the imagination of the internet generation?

Thankfully it all worked out differently and today John sits tearing a path through Day 2A, playing with typical gusto and spirit denied him at the EPT - for whilst he may be the creator, CEO and Executive Producer, those titles bar him from playing, making John the most frustrated spectator walking the rail. Between that and a regular battle to quit smoking it can be a heart breaking sight.

But like I said, John is making up for lost time. He started on 62,000, won a few pots, charged headlong at the table chip leader, and made him give way to Duthie pressure. He’s running good - one of the reasons we’re all here - now up to 82,000.

***

Just one of the over 2,000 PokerStars qualifiers here this week is Michael Migdol, who spoke to the PokerStars video blog team about the main event and a little success he's had elsewhere...

Watch WSOP 08: Michael Migdol Online Qualifier on PokerStars.tv

by John Duthie

Ok, so it didn't quite work out as planned.

I arrived in an unusually cool Vegas two days before the Pot-Limit Hold'em 10K event and hung around the pool at The Wynn letting the jetlag filter out of my system slowly over the next 48Hrs. I felt pretty fresh when the first tournament started, but there was still a lingering self-doubt hanging over me from a couple of months of bad form and bad play.

It's not the frame of mind you want to be in when sitting down with some of the best players in the world. Questioning hands is one thing, questioning your own ability is something altogether different and meant that I started on the back foot and never really got going. This negative frame of mind resulted in me playing about eight events and only managing to make the second day in one of them; the 7-card stud world championship event.

When you start to dread sitting down at a poker table it's time for a major rethink and you have to draw yourself away and begin to rebuild. I had always planned on coming back to London on 10th June because I needed to do some work on the EPT, but it was with a huge sigh of relief that I boarded that return flight, leaving the neon-filled streets and the broken dreams, to shrink away into the desert as we turned and climbed into a beckoning sky.

I have had a week to regroup and meditate on my game and feel stronger now than I did before, but just need to rid myself of the faintest remaining trace of negative thought before I return to battle. My coin-flips will hold up this time and the two-outers will hopefully stop killing my lock hands. My own will has to be stronger than ever before and more than anything I need that hunger back.

Watch this space.